A fat house, a fat car . . . no, this isn’t necessarily a disparaging comment on the current state of the American dream. It’s a description of two sculptural forms that figure in Erwin Wurm’s latest exploration of time, mass, and material incarnation, bloated shapes that round out the first major survey of the artist’s comical and provocative œuvre, “I Love My Time, I Don’t Like My time: Recent Work by Erwin Wurm,” which opens at the Rose Art Museum on April 27. The witty Wurm is best known for his series One-Minute Sculptures (1997–present), in which everyday objects and/or human beings are arranged as per the artist’s instructions into precarious or absurd structures that are difficult to sustain even for the requested minute. These fleeting arrangements express Wurm’s interest in extending the ideas of performance and conceptual art into the realm of sculpture — and in providing a bit of darkly comic commentary on the perils of life and of art. The exhibition spans his work from the early 1990s to the present, including new work that invites audience participation.

The nexus of physical and virtual space and the systems we’ve developed to map them out inform the layered paintings on view in “Sarah Walker: Paintings,” which also opens at the Rose on April 27. This is the first solo museum exhibition for Walker, whose inquiry into the way inner landscapes coexist with external perceptions draws on 21st-century genetic mapping, quantum mechanics, and the wide world of the Web.

British-born American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) also saw in art a window to science, and vice versa, as he used his camera to create some of the earliest attempts to map out the way we move. The entire sets of Muybridge’s The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881) and Animal Locomotion (1887) are included in the formidable new “In Focus: 75 Years of Collecting American Photography,” which opens at the Addison Gallery on April 28. The Addison started collecting photography in 1934, only three years after it opened, with its prescient initial acquisition of a Margaret Bourke-White photograph. The collection is now both broad and deep — and the gallery is celebrating its 75th anniversary by sharing remarkable works from photographers Ansel Adams to Richard Prince.

In September 2004, artist John Malpede put a serious twist on historical re-enactment when he directed a full-scale performance re-creating a two-day tour of impoverished southeastern Kentucky made by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. On April 27 at MIT, Malpede will talk about his æsthetically and politically uncompromising work with artist Harrell Fletcher in connection with exhibitions opening at MIT that evening by both artists.

Walk on by MIT’s campus is dotted with art — 46 works are listed on its most recent “Public Art Collection Map,” a document that you can download if you want to know what that big thing in front of the Stata Center is, or who made the cube-like piece in front of the library.

My Baby Shot Me Down “Abstract painting” is a broad historical category that takes in everything from the utopian spiritual and formal purity of the early decades of the 20th century to the macho of the purely visual as championed by Clement Greenberg later in that century.

Cannibals and castaways Dana Schutz flirts with the ugly, considers our condition, pictures the unimaginable, and uncovers what some might prefer left under a rock.

Ralph Hamilton My lovable, impossible friend of more than 30 years, the artist Ralph Hamilton, died on February 19, of complications from diabetes. He was only 59. It’s a very sad loss. He was one of Boston’s most original and searching painters and had been doing some of his most ambitious and moving work.

Hand made Eight years after Loïs Mailou Jones’s death, School of the Museum of Fine Arts curator Joanna Soltan is proclaiming her to be “among the most significant African-American artists of the 20th century.”

I spy Artist Julia Scher was way ahead of the Homeland Security gang’s obsession with electronic eavesdropping and video voyeurism, having made high-tech installations that allowed museum and gallery goers to watch each other watching each other since the late 1980s.

Naughty by nature Landscape has inspired artists as varied as the romantic 19th-century Hudson River School painters and the macho 20th-century Earth Artists.

Beautiful disaster What we think of as “progress” — urban development, industrialization — has been proceeding at a rapid rate in China over the past decade, with significant environmental and human consequences.

THE NATURE OF THE BEAST | September 10, 2008 In the world of graphic novelist Kevin Hooyman, whose show opens at Proof Gallery on September 13, packed line drawings take you deep into strange and fantastical scenes.

I AM I SAID | September 03, 2008 Tufts University Art Gallery presents “Empire And Its Discontents,” which opens September 15 with work by 11 artists tied to previously colonized regions in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.